The Pampered Life, Viewed From the Inside

Somewhere

Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning in a scene from “Somewhere.”Credit
Merrick Morton/Focus Features

The opening shot of “Somewhere,”Sofia Coppola’s exquisite, melancholy and formally audacious fourth feature, prepares you for what is to follow in a characteristically oblique and subtle manner. A black Ferrari circulates on an otherwise empty desert speedway, driving in and out of the stationary camera’s range as the noise of its engine oscillates between a distant whine and a full-throated roar.

The car completes a few more laps than would be necessary if the point of the scene were traditionally expository — if all Ms. Coppola wanted to convey was the fact that somebody (we don’t yet know who) was driving around in a circle. But what she is really saying is: pay attention; keep looking for longer than you think you need to; suspend your expectations and see what happens.

What happens is something marvelous: a film that never raises its voice (its loudest and most assertive sound is that Ferrari) or panders to your emotions, but that nonetheless has the power to refresh your perceptions and deepen your sympathies. As it proceeds from one careful, watchful, slow shot to the next, a sad and affecting story emerges, about a father’s loneliness and a daughter’s devotion. But the experience of watching “Somewhere,” shot in lovely tones of Southern California haze by the great Harris Savides, is like reading a poem. The scenes play off one another like stanzas, producing patterns and echoes that feel like the camera’s accidental discoveries, even as they are the surest evidence of Ms. Coppola’s formidable and subtle art.

The driver of that car is Johnny Marco, a movie star played, right at the boundary between restraint and catatonia, by Stephen Dorff. Johnny is living at the Chateau Marmont, a storied Hollywood hotel that is either a paradise of easy wish-fulfillment or a purgatory of celebrity anomie. Or maybe both. He seems to be finishing work on one movie while publicizing another — from time to time, he is whisked from the Chateau to a junket or a special-effects prosthetic-making session — but mostly Johnny hangs out, smokes cigarettes, drinks and has sex with one of the women who seem to be at the hotel for just that purpose.

The tricky feat that Ms. Coppola pulls off is to convey the emptiness of Johnny’s situation without denying its appeal, and also without giving him more spiritual depth than would be credible. He lives in a world where his desires are so instantly and easily gratified that they hardly even count as desires, since no longing or effort ever enters into the picture.

In an early scene, after breaking his arm in a drunken stumble (“I do all my own stunts” is his facetious deadpan explanation), he is entertained in his room by twin blond pole dancers who work their way through a routine that seems more calisthenic than erotic as he dozes off. (Later he will fall asleep during foreplay, his head between the legs of a recent conquest, which is to say a woman with whom he had just made eye contact.)

“Somewhere” is partly a wry and knowing comedy of show-business life, a life Ms. Coppola, who comes from a tribe of filmmakers, composers and actors, surely knows firsthand. But to overemphasize the autobiographical dimensions of “Somewhere” would be to stop short of identifying its extraordinary insight and originality. There is, after all, no shortage of movies about celebrity dissolution, and in the age of “Entourage” and TMZ we probably don’t even need feature films to bring us the old news that movie stars are pampered, narcissistic and promiscuous. That’s part of the job description, after all. But Ms. Coppola illuminates the bubble of fame and privilege from the inside and maps its emotional and existential contours with unnerving precision and disarming sensitivity.

Johnny is, in part, a prisoner of his own fantasies and aspirations, and he drifts through his days in a state of dazed, weirdly polite bafflement. The only thing keeping him from utter ruin is his professionalism, which expresses itself in an ingrained habit of courtesy. His job is a paradox: he must be himself by conforming to what everyone else wants him to be, and so he must answer dumb questions at a news conference, listen patiently to a young aspiring actor’s plea for advice and travel to Italy for a ridiculous awards show.

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I know: poor guy! But without making him especially noble or smart, Mr. Dorff makes it clear that Johnny is human. It turns out that he has an 11-year-old daughter, who at first comes for a brief visit and then, because of an unspecified crisis in her mother’s life, for a longer stay. Her name is Cleo, and she is played by Elle Fanning with heartbreaking clarity and grace. Cleo, having grown up on this strange planet of fame, has learned both how to take advantage of its entitlements and how to acquire some of the life skills that her father has allowed to atrophy. She calls up room service to order ingredients for a homemade dinner and later serves her father and his brother a meal of eggs Benedict.

To some extent, Cleo mothers Johnny, but she also watches him with the nervous, open adoration of a child. Watchfulness is her defining trait, and Ms. Fanning can do more with her eyes than performers many times her age. She conveys jealousy, concern, curiosity and need, and above all the wisdom and half-intact innocence of a person who has witnessed too much adult misbehavior, partly by dint of having a father who has never quite grown up.

I am aware of spelling out themes that Ms. Coppola leaves unstated. But the waters of this film are not only still and deep but also bracingly clear, and the most remarkable thing about it may be how much it implies while saying so little. There is barely any quotable or memorable dialogue, and yet its images are so eloquent that they demand to be seen over and over again.

Repeated viewing reveals how thoroughly Ms. Coppola has absorbed her influences and how much she has pushed herself to grow from film to film. Like “Lost in Translation” and “Marie Antoinette,” “Somewhere” is a study in gilded loneliness. And much in the way that “Lost,” set in Japan, showed a debt to recent Asian cinema, so “Somewhere,” which takes a voyage to Italy, betrays an engagement with the films of Michelangelo Antonioni.

This is not a matter of imitation, but rather of mastery, of finding — by borrowing if necessary — a visual vocabulary suited to the story and its environment. If you pay close attention, “Somewhere” will show you everything.